We're on a mission to bring rapid prototyping to microcontrollers, and we want you to join us! Introducing the mbed challenge...

Our mission is to bring rapid prototyping to microcontrollers. 3D rapid prototyping has come a long way over the last few years and we don't think the electronics has kept up. As the way to arrange the "atoms" improves (the physical form, mechanics, aesthetics), we want to make sure it just as quick to prototype the "bits" (the intelligence, behaviour, connectivity).

So far, we've made a pretty good start with mbed; the tools, hardware and peripheral interfaces are all working really well in their goal of getting out of the way and letting you concentrate on your application. It is also great to see how supportive everyone joining the community has been, and even better when you see people getting results. Lets try and keep it that way!

But we think we've on scratched the surface so far.

Next up in our sights is making all the things you might want to connect your mbed up to "just work". As you will have noticed, we've been building in new features in to mbed to help with sharing know-how and experience; a cookbook, user notebooks, project publishing and, currently in beta testing, user libraries. This is the start of what we hope can make it possible to pick up any peripheral and have it working in a few minutes, or have an idea and be able to find a number of building blocks so you aren't starting from scratch.

So we've teamed up with Circuit Cellar, Elektor and NXP to bring you the "NXP mbed Design Challenge". This is your chance to win some money for helping out!

The challenge is to publish a project and the building blocks that make it up that is inspiring, inventive, useful or just plain cool. The great thing when you publish something like this is you are helping your fellow developers prototype even faster by building on your work, but you can also enter it in the design challenge and win some of the prize money that is up for grabs :)

We're going to use the tag mbedchallenge to mark things related to this challenge, so if you post anything on mbed (notebook, cookbook, forum) or on flickr, youtube etc, make sure you tag it with mbedchallenge!

For all the details of how to enter and the prizes up for grabs, see the video and check out:

• http://circuitcellar.com/nxpmbeddesignchallenge/

Help us help you prototype faster than ever. Start prototyping the mbed way!